Getting the picture

by Brian Eno

From W magazine, Issue 6, September 1996. W is a "quarterly
guide to the best in books", published by Waterstone's.

At last year's Turner Prize ceremony, Brian Eno accused art criticism of
being confusing, marginal and unable to offer a coherent argument for art's
existence. Here, in an exclusive article coinciding with the publication of his
book, A Year with Swollen Appendices, he explains what he meant.

Last year I was asked to present the Turner Prize and to give a short
speech. Short is the key word in these things - because it's scheduled for TV
broadcast, you get two minutes. In my speech I pointed out that most of the
people at the ceremony, presumably members of the 'art community', probably knew
a lot more about currents of thought in contemporary science than those in
contemporary art. I mentioned some science writers - people like Gould, Dawkins
and Hawking - whose books had widened and deepened the cultural conversation
about science in a way that no writers about art have come anywhere close to.
Compared to science, I suggested, contemporary art seems confusing and marginal.

This seemed to strike a chord with a lot of people. I got approached in the
street by strangers who said: 'Why didn't you finish?' I think the position I
took was appreciated because it came from a sympathetic would-be participant,
not from a hostile outsider. I wasn't saying that it was all incomprehensible
nonsense; what I was saying was that it gets made to look that way by how we
talk and write about it. It seems to me that there is no consensus within the
art world about what all this stuff is being done for, who benefits, and what
the nature of those benefits might be. So I want to ask why people make art (or
any other cultural activity) in the first place, and what they get from doing
it.

2,000 words is not going to answer this question; perhaps, though, I can at
least ask it clearly.

My feeling is that the state of our writing and thinking about art and
culture (for me, interchangeable terms) is similar to the state of knowledge in
the natural sciences before Charles Darwin appeared on the scene. Natural
history consisted of making lists of the various observed manifestations of
life, comparing things to each other, giving them names, and heaping fact upon
fact on the assumption that they would all add up to something.

Darwin cut through this chaos of phenomena with a very clear and simple
statement: 'the fit survive'. This near-tautology made it possible for people to
ask intelligent, answerable questions about living creatures because it led
people to assume that their observed characteristics were probably there for a
reason. It didn't stop debate or quench people's interest in the study of life,
but extended it; far from making life less mysterious, it suggested an endless
supply of new mysteries for us to address. This is the effect of good, big
theories: they present frames upon which thought can be structured. Prior to
Darwin, the only frame was an entirely anthropocentric one (actually a
theocentric one, which ends up being the same thing since we make God in our own
image) that the closer life was to being like us (and therefore God) the
'better' it was. As a theory this left a lot to be desired, and its results can
be seen in the now-laughable convolutions of much pre-Darwinian writing about
nature.

Art writing, as I said, seems to be still in that type of confusion. Sub
theories abound and collide, observations are piled up in unsorted, unusable
heaps, and there is no over-arching paradigm to help us find ways of looking at
it all as a unified field of human endeavour.

Is such a paradigm even possible? One objection is that culture has always
evolved by breaking its categories, by becoming what it has apparently never
been before, and that therefore any attempt to 'define' it is doomed to failure.
But 'definition' is not what I'm asking for. Darwin, for instance, was not
trying to 'define' life; he was trying to say how it came about that life
involves the kinds of processes and forms that it does. He was looking for a
deep statement that could discover a commonality among all the manifestations of
life.

I think you could in principle make a statement at a similar deep level
about all the manifestations of human culture and art. I think, though, that to
do so you would need to ask three questions. What activities does the word
'culture' actually describe? On what basis do we compare culture objects with
each other? Where is the value of cultural experience actually located - in the
objects themselves or somewhere else?

Perhaps we can work backwards from Darwin and start by abandoning the
'art-ocentric' view of culture. When Darwin gave us the intellectual tool by
which we could look at life as a unified field, he also implied that everything
in that field connects to everything else: there isn't a hierarchy of life
forms, but a web. We need a similar insight in the way we look at culture, a way
of seeing all the cultural things that humans do - from hairstyles to abstract
paintings - as different but connected manifestations of the same drive. So I
start with a simple, inclusive assumption: culture is everything we don't have
to do. Culture consists of the gratuitous stylistic extras that we add to the
things we do have to do. You have to eat, but you don't have to decorate
elaborately prepared curries with silver leaf. You have to move around, but you
don't have to dance.

Abandoning the idea of a cultural hierarchy would also do away with the idea
of a scale of intrinsic values, of ranking some cultural forms as 'better' than
others. Just as the 'pyramid model' of life flattens down as we begin to
understand life's interconnectedness (until it becomes impossible to maintain,
for example, that horses are in any meaningful way 'better' than microbes), so
any similarly evaluative view of culture starts to look distinctly dodgy. Does
this mean that cake decoration is as valuable as Cezanne? No - I'm saying that
the concept of cultural value is an irrelevant and meaningless metric with which
to try to compare culture objects because the idea of value as a quality
that resides in culture objects is wrong.

But there is value somewhere, isn't there? I mean, we do feel that we have
experiences of value when we hear pieces of music or read books or see films or
admire textiles, don't we? And when we do, where exactly is it coming from if
not from the object?

I think that, in objects of culture, value is always conferred.
That's to say, the quality of our experience of something is exactly that: the
quality of our experience. A lot of twentieth century art has been an
accumulation of evidence for this proposition. In this view the value of a work
of culture is in the transaction between it and its user: if a valuable
transaction can be caused to take place (even just by putting something more or
less arbitrary in a frame which says, 'Within this frame you could experience a
valuable transaction'), the thing has worked. This is obvious and radical at the
same time, for it removes from the discussion much of what has preoccupied
critics and conversationalists about culture for the last few hundred years. If
value is not in things, but conferred upon them by our act of experiencing them,
then relativity reigns. A piece of music can be a great work for a whole
civilization for 300 years, or for one person for 20 minutes. There is no
'outside' to this, no Court of Cultural Value where you can measure the work in
order to arrive at any more objective assessment, and all manner of evaluations
by critics will not establish such. In fact, that kind of evaluation is the
wrong job for critics to be doing.

However, if we abandon all concepts of absolute value, can we still find a
basis for regarding the activity of culture as being in any way useful?

The only thing we notice is that all peoples make culture: we don't know of
any group of people who don't engage in culture in the sense I'm using the word.
Even human groups that are in extreme deprivation still find time for activities
that make no perceptible difference to their physical survival. Perhaps this is
actually the beginning of an answer to these questions. It seems clear that
culture is a biological drive for humans. It is not something that we
just add on at the end, after we've dealt with all those survival problems, but
something we keep doing all the time. Therefore, as a good neo-Darwinian, I
assume that for such a persistent activity to have evolved at all, it has to be
doing something of tremendous importance for us.

What is that? What makes you become emotionally and intellectually engaged
with, say, the film Citizen Kane? You know it's a fiction. You know
you're accepting all sorts of technical devices and tricks and falsehoods, that
this need have nothing to do with anything that ever really happened. But you
surrender to it and something happens in your mind.

What happens when you successfully engage with a piece of culture is that
you are left with a highly-evolved and complex metaphor. Now the words 'Citizen
Kane', for instance, connote for you, and for others who've seen the film, a
great cluster of ideas about conceit, grandeur, power, egocentricity. You have
taken part in an experiment, an experiment whose question is, 'How do we feel
about this world?' (and, in unspoken brackets, the attendant question, 'Compared
to all the other worlds we know or can imagine?'). Perhaps that's clear enough
with something as apparently translatable as Citizen Kane. Ideas shine
forth from it, and they are discussable. But what about Ming vases? What about
Jackson Pollock? How do those things engage us?

They engage us stylistically: that is, by making stylistic choices that we
find significantly different. Jackson Pollock makes sense only in terms of a
particular history of other paintings, in terms of the stylistic decisions he
made that distinguished his from other paintings. Style is the language of
culture, and the changing of styles - the shuffling and elaborating and
re-contexting and combining and isolating of styles - is the conversation of
culture. Style is ideas in the process of forming themselves. Ideas about what?
About complicated bundles of assumptions about where we are in the world and
what sort of world it is anyway. A complex brass door knocker, for instance, is
not just a way of getting the attention of someone in the house, but also a way
of engaging the attention of everyone outside the house: of telling them things
about station, materials, weight, importance, connections to other strands of
culture. The Structuralists noticed this - that a cultural universe could be
seen in every grain of cultural sand.

What is the use of this constant style shuffling? I think it may be the most
important thing that humans do. Our only strength as a species - given that we
are biologically weak, fragile and not all that fast - is our ability to
communicate directly with each other, and from that to co-operate. This gives us
humans a new way of learning - not with the plodding slowness of the genetic
message, but with the immediacy of our contract. Some of the knowledge
we wish to share with each other is scientifically accessible - statable in
relatively unambiguous and testable terms. But I venture that most of it isn't.
We somehow have to arrive at decisions about not only those things we can
isolate sufficiently to test in the laboratory, but also all those things that
can't be separated out from their context, things of which we don't even know
the boundaries, things that are vague, complicated and mostly unknowable. How,
for instance, does one arrive at a feeling about, say, vegetarianism? Well,
partly through 'rational discussion', but mostly through a complex bundle of
stylistic choices - through taste. And taste is evolved as much by soap operas
and Damien Hirst's split cows and BSE scares as it is by rationality.

Stylistic choices are cultural gossip about what's fitting and what's not,
and that gossip becomes the new vocabulary of our lives - the language within
which we frame our decisions about how we prefer to live, what we value and what
we don't. This is a process of the evolution of empathy, which I'd define as the
ability to understand what the other person is seeing, or where the other person
is looking from, to engage with them in experimental, surrogate worlds of style.
In order to do this, we have become incredibly sensitive to a whole layer of
stylistic signs: in fact it is among these signs that we spend most of our time
if we get the chance. We code and decode continually, thus casually tossing
around almost inexplicably rich bundles of cultural assumptions. We rarely even
notice ourselves doing it.

To be capable of carrying out complex, un-predefined (i.e. non-instinctual)
projects with other people, a great deal of this rapid elision from one
perspective to another is necessary: style is very fast. We talk to our kids in
one way, to our friends at work in another, to our lovers in yet another, to the
lady in the corner shop in another. When we make these shifts we are exercising
our understanding of the worlds from which they are listening to us, and we are
also projecting onwards our own view of the world in which we would like this
conversation to be taking place. When you think about it, this is an enormous
and complex talent that humans spend their lives exercising, rehearsing,
refining.

Culture, that place where you can surrender to new worlds without getting
hurt (because they are only made of signs, after all) is where we conduct these
experiments, where we constantly invent worlds - some no bigger than earrings -
in order to make better sense of this one. Since most human behaviour arises not
from a series of purely rational choices made in possession of full evidence,
but by arriving at a consensus (an agreement to inhabit one world of values
rather than another), my contention is that culture is the way we evolve that
matrix of values, and style is the language of culture.

Culture is where we live our shared mental lives. We need a way of
understanding this habitat, of treating it with the respect and care it
deserves. I believe the approach I've outlined would help us get there.

More than just a diary of day-to-day activities, A Year with Swollen
Appendices contains the thoughts and observations that Brian Eno recorded in
his notebooks throughout 1995. As befits a man who is not just a producer but
also a musician, composer and artist, these thoughts touch on an enormous range
of subjects - from ambient music and his recording projects with Bowie and U2,
to shamanism, Bosnia, charities and Duchamp's Fountain. 'Swollen' by a
series of essays, as well as letters to various friends and a collection of his
own short stories, the book is a fascinating record of one man's year.

A Year with Swollen Appendices: The Diary of Brian Eno Faber and
Faber £9.99 pbh